Jerome Kaufman, Emeritus Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Marcia Caton Campbell, Milwaukee Program Director, Center for Resilient Cities.

Our story is about the value of collaboration when stepping gingerly into virgin, unexplored territory in the planning field. In 1981 one of the authors of this piece, Jerry Kaufman, joined with Elizabeth Howe to teach the first-ever planning ethics class in a graduate planning program. Twenty years later, in 2001, Kaufman entered into collaboration with Marcia Caton Campbell to teach the first-ever class in a graduate planning program on community food planning. At the time each of these courses was offered, similarities were evident. Sparse research had been undertaken in the planning community to draw upon in teaching either subject. Little demand for, let alone interest, existed among planning students and planning faculty for either class to be offered. And both subjects were decidedly on the back burner of planning practitioners.

Yet, in both cases, these two quite different fields of inquiry gradually gained acceptance and legitimacy within the planning community. With planning ethics, which has been around much longer than community food planning, that acceptance is much more apparent. Planning ethics is now well integrated into the curricula of many planning schools, and recognized as an appropriate arena for theoretical inquiry as well as empirical research. And the professional planning community clearly recognizes the importance of ethics through its codes of ethics, which provide guidance for denoting both the aspirations and limits of planner behavior. In contrast, community food planning is still at the seedling stage, but recent signs show that the plant is growing at a healthy pace and becoming more firmly rooted in the planning community.

The circumstances that led to our co-teaching a semester-long community food-planning course are worth considering. In early 1997, Kaufman was asked to head up the Madison Food System Project (MFSP), part of the larger Wisconsin Food System Partnership, a five-year program funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UWM). With little knowledge of the food system, but having a good understanding of cities and regions, Kaufman accepted this challenge with a mix of trepidation and intrigue — trepidation, because he was an outsider to food system work and had a lot of learning to do, and intrigue, because the void in the literature of planning about food issues offered him an opportunity to cover new ground.

Soon after becoming MFSP director, Kaufman decided to combine his new interest in food issues with his role as a planning educator. Since it was his turn to teach the department’s required planning workshop in the fall of 1997, he decided to jumpstart the learning process in the food arena by devoting the workshop to a community food assessment of the Madison-Dane County region. This was an ambitious undertaking, given the newness of the subject, but as a senior faculty member Kaufman had considerable range to choose a workshop topic of his liking. With the assistance of Kami Pothukuchi, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (URPL) at that time, they undertook this new endeavor. They also joined forces to do some research on the connection between food and planning, and MFSP began to engage in some field projects in the Madison area. Pothukuchi left Madison in the spring of 1998 to accept a full-time position in the planning program at Wayne State University.

Marcia Caton Campbell joined URPL in the fall of 1998 as an assistant professor. Hired primarily to teach conflict resolution, she also had a passing interest in food system issues. As a junior faculty member, however, she was initially discouraged by some of her new colleagues from joining Kaufman in what they viewed as a boondoggle. Delighted to discover Caton Campbell’s interest, Kaufman soon drew her into the web of MFSP activities as its assistant director. She served as advisor to the MFSP student project assistants and collaborator with Kaufman on MFSP research and community-based service initiatives. They then began to discuss collaborating on a new course on community food planning. By then, the footing for such a course was more secure, not only among some planning students, but also with students in other campus departments, as interest in strengthening community and regional food systems began to rise. Moreover, Kaufman’s colleagues in the planning department, puzzled at first by another of his wanderings into strange territory, began to think that maybe he was on to something.

Planning for Community Food Systems had its initial offering in the spring semester of 2001. Widely advertised across the UWM campus and structured as an introduction to community food planning for juniors, seniors, and graduate students, the course attracted students from diverse fields of study. The 17-student pool for this initial offering was quite broad: 6 were undergraduates and 11 were graduate students; 3 were URPL graduate students, while the rest came from at least 7 other campus departments; 5 of the 17 were self-described “hard-core foodies,” while the remainder were drawn to the course out of curiosity. Kaufman and Caton Campbell were definitely teaching to the interested, but not yet to the converted.

The course combined lectures and discussion about the structure of the food system and food system issues with field trips to community food projects in the Madison area that ranged from a food co-op to community gardens and community-supported agriculture farms. A reader of articles drawn from research literature, newspapers, and magazines as the course textbook was prepared. The growing food systems expertise around the Madison campus and the Madison community was tapped by inviting guest speakers to the class. Students were assessed through a midterm exam on basic food system concepts, reflective responses to field trips, and a final paper on a food issue of their choice. In addition, students engaged in service learning, contributing 10 hours of volunteer time to a food-related community organization over the course of the semester and writing reflectively upon that work. The course was sufficiently well received that the URPL faculty thought it should be offered again, although skepticism lingered about the relevance of the food system to urban and regional planning. At the end of the 2000–2001 academic year Kaufman retired, turning the directorship of MFSP and the teaching of the course over to Caton Campbell.

After reviewing, with Kaufman, the initial offering of Planning for Community Food Systems, Caton Campbell decided to teach the course again in the fall of 2003 solely at the graduate level to avoid content duplication with two undergraduate-level courses in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The course remained structured around lecture, discussion, field trips to Madison area community food projects, and guest lectures by other faculty. This time, 11 of the 13 students in the class were master’s students in planning. Seven of the 13 were “hard-core foodies,” three of whom chose community food planning as a concentration within the URPL master’s program. The seven indicated that they had come to UWM specifically to study food systems, although only a few had significant prior knowledge or experience in the area.

As before, the students wrote a midterm exam and reflective papers on class field trips. This time, however, the service learning component and individual final paper were replaced by a collaborative final project undertaken by the entire class: a white paper exploring ripeness for the formation of a local food policy council. The students ended the course by presenting the white paper to an invited audience of approximately 40 city and county planners, local government officials, professionals working in food-related agencies and nonprofits, and interested students and faculty.

Planning for Community Food Systems was offered a third time during Caton Campbell’s appointment at UW-Madison, during the fall of 2005. The course again attracted 13 graduate students, now almost all planning students, 6 of whom had come to URPL to specialize in community food planning and most of whom had some prior experience in food systems work. Caton Campbell was now not teaching to the newly converted, but to people with longstanding interest in the area. In addition, by 2005 the food systems literature had developed such that several excellent books could be used as course texts in addition to the standard reader. These recently published works and the students’ level of sophistication raised the level of discourse about the food system and its relationship to planning to a much higher level. The course was structured similarly to the 2003 offering; however, this time, the class undertook an ambitious, participatory community food assessment for a Madison neighborhood.

What lessons did we glean from our collaboration? First and foremost, we discovered that a small, but steady, stream of students — roughly one-sixth of the incoming URPL students annually from 2003 on — were not only interested in studying community food planning, but were drawn to the UWM campus and to URPL in particular to satisfy their desire to merge interests in the food system and planning. During the 9-year period that community food planning flourished at URPL, master’s and doctoral students structured their degree concentrations around food, took courses in many other departments around campus to add breadth and depth to their substantive interest, wrote working papers and theses that developed our understanding of the local food system, formed an official practitioners and consultants, and as faculty members in other planning programs around the United States (including Branden Born; see his contribution later in this paper).

As Caton Campbell prepared to leave URPL for planning practice at the end of the 2005–2006 academic year,Footnote 1 her students compiled a guidebook of pathways through UWM courses for future students interested in community food planning. These pathways represent multiple avenues through which students might engage in food planning work, by focusing on food and land use, food and the environment, food and community development, food and economic development, and the like.

The second lesson has to do with the reaction of others: our course was legitimated at the planning department level among its originally skeptical faculty, both by the students we succeeded in recruiting to our program and by the community food planning research and activism that we engaged in outside the classroom and in the community. Community food planning offered synergies in research and professional collaboration with colleagues from other departments, including rural sociology, agronomy, and family and consumer science. Our collaborations not only attracted significant numbers of students, but garnered substantial research dollars and support for students.

Third, the collaboration smoothed the waters for Caton Campbell to become engaged in food planning teaching, research, and community service activities. Having Kaufman, as a senior faculty member, “run interference” for her in the department helped other colleagues give her the green light to pursue her multiple interests in community food planning.

Finally, by joining forces, we had the opportunity to mentor students who expressed interest in food planning and advise them on career paths. Some wanted to work specifically in food planning. Most wanted to follow more traditional job paths in planning, but with a desire to expand their prospective colleagues’ horizons about the benefits of supporting local and regional food systems. In addition, the relationship between Kaufman and Caton Campbell, with Kaufman serving as a mentor to Caton Campbell at the beginning of her tenure at UWM, soon developed into an equal partnership. We both benefited from the rich give and take of our collaboration, with a productive synergy as the byproduct.